Company uses SLAs, has disaster-recovery plan in case problems arise with hosted applications.
When Vedior North America decided to deploy a hosted mission-critical application, uptime and service-level agreements were CIO Peter Ross’s chief concerns. Bullhorn’s hosted staffing and recruiting software are key to the placement firm Vedior’s livelihood.
When Vedior North America decided to deploy a hosted mission-critical application, uptime and service-level agreements (SLA) were CIO Peter Ross’s chief concerns. Bullhorn’s hosted staffing and recruiting software are key to the placement firm Vedior’s livelihood.
Vedior and Bullhorn negotiated an SLA covering response times for incidents of varying severity. “As an IS organization, we have our own vocabulary and our own metrics. We needed to make sure the SLA we’re working with meshed with our escalation metrics here,” Ross says.
Ross also had to ensure his SLA with Bullhorn aligned with the SLAs his unit maintains internally with Vedior divisions. “Within our own business, depending on certain types of outages or service interruptions, there are SLAs that require us to get back to our users in a certain amount of time. If our SLA calls for a one-hour response for certain types of outages, we made [Bullhorn’s] response time a half-hour.”
The SLA isn’t the only mechanism in place to protect Vedior. Ross is assembling an operational version of Bullhorn’s software in-house to cover the company in the event of a major event, such as a fiber cut or regional disaster. As data hits the Bullhorn application, it will be copied to Ross’s replica, which will run in Vedior’s disaster-recovery site.
If the Bullhorn service is lost, “I don’t have enough time to go buy the equipment and get it up and running. Three-quarters of my [company] would be out of business. So I’m creating a replica, a running version of it. It’s not synchronized in real time, but it’s close enough,” Ross says.
In addition, a software escrow agreement is in place that ensures Vedior can obtain a copy of its source code if something happens to Bullhorn’s business, such as bankruptcy or an abrupt change in development direction. Getting the software escrow agreement wasn’t expensive, but it makes Vedior comfortable, because it provides another means of recovering from unexpected events, he says.
Despite all the precautions, Ross knows outages in Bullhorn’s service are unavoidable, as they would be with an application deployed in-house. So far, he hasn’t experienced any significant outages – just one minor blip when Bullhorn needed to swap out a router.
In that case, Bullhorn’s efforts to keep Vedior in the loop went a long way. “There’s only one thing I don’t like, and it’s surprises,” Ross says. Bullhorn let Vedior know in advance that service might go out for a few seconds, and Ross was able to prepare users.
